Summary:
This qualitative research refers to the patients’ perspectives on the therapeutic factors operating in long-term group therapy of an integrated systemic orientation (ISO). The research questions of the study are the following: How do patients perceive the kind of help they have received from the long-term group therapy of an ISO? How are the factors that patients identify as helpful transformed within different phases of therapy? How are they identified in the initial, advanced, and final phases of their therapy? How the therapeutic factors are gradually exposed to the participants within the experience’s detail and complexity? For this study, a qualitative research method was chosen by interviewing the patients using specifically the method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Members of the groups were interviewed in three phases, in order to explore the differences in the participants' perspectives in the initial, advanced and final phases of group psychotherapy. In the first phase, semi-structured interviews were taken from members of two groups of long-term ISO psychotherapy in the first year of their group psychotherapy. In the second and third phases, semi-structured interviews were taken from the same participants in the second and third year of their participation in the group, respectively. The research sample consisted of 13 participants of both genders. The results after using IPA largely confirm Yalom's classification of therapeutic factors for long-term ISO group therapy. However, besides the 11 expected therapeutic factors, an additional therapeutic factor emerged as a finding which was labelled as "development of pluralistic perspectives". This is a therapeutic factor that refers to processes similar to those described by contemporary developmental psychology research around "theory of mind". This new therapeutic factor appears as distinct from the second year of therapy onwards, while in the first phase of therapy it appears as a subcategory of the thematic category "development of socializing techniques". Furthermore, compared to the first phase of the study, differences emerge in the second and third year of group therapy in the way participants perceive "existential factors" and "interpersonal learning" as revealed by the additional subcategories in these therapeutic factors. Finally, the results of the study shed in-depth light on participants' experience of long-term ISO group psychotherapy and therefore highlight in more detail the particular way each therapeutic factor operates.
Keywords:
therapeutic factors, systemic orientation group psychotherapy, interpretative phenomenological analysis, development of pluralistic perspectives
